Shapeshifting

The shape of heavy tears streaking down, earthwards, journeying to find our loved ones faces, again The shape of trembling lips the very moment we recall their forevermore absence as we write the date, on this day their birthday The shape of the book on the shelf in the store, Read more

Judith Staff

Judith Staff’s background is in teaching and early years education. She still teaches occasionally, though now her main focus is in child welfare and safeguarding children. Her work includes delivering training, presenting at conferences, and engaging in collaborative projects with schools around child abuse awareness and sexual violence prevention. She enjoys writing blogs and poetry on topics she feels passionate about. Judith loves running, gym classes and karate. She is married to an art lecturer and they live in Northamptonshire, England with their three free-spirited children, a 12- year-old son, and daughters aged 11 and 9.

Lessons in Healing From the Aisles of Target

August 2016             I’m kneeling in the aisle like a worshipper dropping tears into the white ceramic shell of an armadillo.             What else would you do on your inaugural Target run in a new town you thought you would love but don’t even like? Read more

Summer Hammond

Summer Hammond grew up in rural Iowa and Missouri. After parting ways with her faith, she went on to earn a BA in Literature, teach ninth grade reading, and achieve her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She is the author of three unpublished novels. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, StoryQuarterly, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Review. She is the winner of the 2023 New Letters Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction.

The Goodbye Girl

We stood over you with the dropper of oxycodone, trying to get it in the tiny pocket inside your cheek, the three of us, like The Witches of Eastwick, but a lot less funny. Your jaw was clenched tight like a clam because you were about to die, only we Read more

Myra Slotnick

Myra Slotnick is a queer playwright and activist living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Covid struck she became eager to explore other genres, culminating in a collection of stories, and several essays.

Close to Home

Today is a good day to die. The neighbor’s mother is dying next door, fifty feet from us. She has been dying for some days. The son arrived yesterday, though, from Ohio, all red-eyed, sleep deprived, and unshaven, and I happened to be collecting the mail. “Hi, how are you?” I Read more

Myra Slotnick

Myra Slotnick is a queer playwright and activist living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Covid struck she became eager to explore other genres, culminating in a collection of stories, and several essays.

Departure

his life is fleeting his spirit walking away cricket cries break through the veil of his eternal night each timid step he makes on brittle bones glued together with a poisonous elixir that drips and overflows pooling around his icicle grey eyes it strips away his beauty one strand of Read more

Julie Anderson

Julie Anderson is the Creator and Publisher of Feminine Collective. Julie was inspired to create this safe place for women to share their secrets, desires, triumphs and pain as the antithesis of what mainstream media offers women today. In her column Pursuit of Perfection, she explores the importance of rectifying the balance of inner and outer beauty through essays, poems and articles on self-esteem, shame, family, and self- acceptance.

A Branch Removed

Of our family tree you are a branch life’s cruel disposition removed from us when I was young; memories of you faded as years lapsed by the way a tree forgets leaves it shed over the years. Leaving me with stories my mother tells about the love you had for Read more

Amber R. Dulaney

Amber R. Dulaney is a stay at home Mom residing in Ohio with her husband. She aims for her writing to be relatable, aid in people knowing they are not alone, and in some way, helps them heal. In November of 2008, she received a diploma from The Institute of Children's Literature.

When the Parent Becomes the Child: And Then There Was One

I’ve never minded solitude. For a writer, it’s a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a particular kind of loneliness. —Laurie Graham My mother is leaving me. Her mind allows her to tell me about my favorite stuffed animal when I was three, my Effalunt, but Read more

Dori Owen

Dori Owen is a storyteller, writing from small town Arizona, after living a few decades in California as an LA Wild Child, with a brief stop in Reno. She settled into grownup life as a project manager, collecting an MBA and a few husbands along the way. She is a shown artist and her favorite pastime is upcycling old furniture and decor she finds from thrift stores. She lives with the cat who came to visit but stayed. The love of her life is her grown son who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her essays and poems have been published in RAW&UNFILTERED VOL I, StigmaFighters Vol 2, and Love Notes From Humanity. Her blogs have been featured on The Lithium Chronicles, Open Thought Vortex, Sudden Denouement, and The Mighty.

Kissing the Patriarch Goodbye

It’s been over six years now, since I last spoke to my father: mid-summer, July 15th, 2014. I was in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he was lying on a gurney at a funeral home — dead as a doornail. To hide the incisions of his autopsy, the back Read more

Karin Swann-Rubenstein

Karin is a writer (poetry, essays, social commentary) entranced by the relationship between inner-work and social change. Inspired by the revelations in her own healing, she's come to see the de-humanizing impact of patriarchy on women, men and people of color. She envisions the emergence of more empowered women, more attuned, self-reflective men, and the dismantling, for the betterment of all, of the patriarchal gender binary. After decades of inquiry as a feminist, queer activist and encouraged by the growing movement of men 'wanting out' of the "Man Box," she ascribes to a humanism that re-awakens the deep feminine in us all, where the power in our all-too-human vulnerability connects us with greater sympathy and respect for all things inter-dependent and of this earth. She holds masters degrees in gender studies/communication, political philosophy, and psychotherapy and is a long-time student of The Diamond Approach. When not writing, she’s mom to twin, 10-year-old boys and works with her husband on their retreat center in the Anderson Valley, CA. She lives with her family in Berkeley, CA. Another world is not only possible. She is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. - Arundhati Roy